2.5-Inch SAS Hard Disk Drives Roundup. Page 14

For a few years we have been putting aside an absolutely new type of hard disk drives: server solutions in 2.5-inch form-factor. We realized it was a big omission on our part and today we are ready to rehabilitate ourselves at least partially by introducing to you six solutions like that.

Performance in PCMark Vantage

To make this part of our test session complete, we are going to run the latest version of PCMark called Vantage. Compared with the previous versions, the benchmark has become more up-to-date and advanced in its selection of subtests as well as Windows Vista orientation. Each subtest is run ten times and the results of the ten runs are averaged.

Here is a brief description of each subtest:

Windows Defender is when the HDD is under multithreaded load, one thread scanning files for malicious software.

Gaming emulates the typical load on the disk subsystem when the user is playing a video game.

Photo Gallery emulates loading of images from a photo gallery.

Vista Start Up emulates the disk subsystem load when booting up Windows Vista.

Movie Maker emulates video editing load.

Media Center. This is the load on the hard disk when the user is running Windows Media Center.

Media Player emulates the loading of files into Windows Media Player.

Application Loading shows the drive’s speed when loading popular applications.

Basing on these subtests, the drive’s overall performance rating is calculated.

In the newer version of the benchmark and under multithreaded load we’ve got the same leader Hitachi C10K300 while the Fujitsu shows the strong points of its firmware and takes second place.

We see the same standings in the Gaming test. There is nothing to comment upon.

Photographers are going to prefer the Hitachi C10K300 to the other HDDs in this review because it is 50% faster than them. Moreover, the HDD even beats any of the 15,000rpm 3.5-inch drives we have tested so far.

Switching from Windows XP to Windows Vista does not change anything in the drives’ standings. The Fujitsu is still first, followed closely by the Hitachi C10K300. Take note that the Seagate 15K.1 is not too fast, again.

There are no changes in the Movie Maker test in comparison with the older version of the benchmark.

The Media Center test depends heavily on how the drive’s firmware interacts with the cache memory. Desktop HDDs usually show better results in it. Here, our SAS drives are not very fast. The old Seagate 15K.1 and 10K.2 are obviously worse than the others.

The HDDs split up into three groups under this load. The Hitachi C10K300 and Fujitsu are in the lead again while the Seagate 15K.1 is on the losing side. The latter seems to provide an example of how the older HDDs are worse than the newer ones.

There is one test where the 15,000rpm drive feels better than the others. It is the Application Loading test in this version of PCMark. The low performance of the Seagate 10K.1 is not a surprise but the Hitachi C10K147 finds itself in last place quite unexpectedly.

Anyway, the final scores have not changed much. The Hitachi C10K300 is still in the lead, followed by the Fujitsu.